I
stood up ... and urged the unfairness of judging animals any more than
of men, only by those of our own country.

Fanny
Burney, March 1774

Centuries before Europeans first set
foot on the continent we now call Australia, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Chinese
and the Indians had elaborate ideas about a land somewhere to the south of Java.
These ideas were the product of imagination rather than experience. Their
stories of palaces of gold, of fabulous birds of prey, of a kingdom of women or
of dwarfs, were bound up in religious belief, or were extensions of their
science.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, more prosaic images drew Western Europeans to seek this 'terra
australis incognita': the profits of the spice trade, the souls to be saved, and
the scientific curiosities awaiting discovery. Alvero de Mendana in 1567 and
Pedro Fernandez de Quiros in 1605 set out from Callao in Spanish Peru to claim
the unknown land for Spain and Catholicism but hesitated and turned back without
seeing it. The Portuguese may have sailed along the east coast, to beat the
Spanish to the continent's supposed riches, but if so they did not find the
riches they sought. From 1606 the Dutch pieced together the coast-line of the
continent in the north and west, and called it New Holland. They found no gold
or spices, only sand, flies, naked savages and a few weird animals. In 1642,
Abel Janszoon Tasman saw better country with good water and timber in the south,
and named it Anthoony van Diemenslandt. Yet he thought so little of it that, for
the sake of brevity, he left no detailed description. Although there was
evidence that the land was inhabited, no contact was made with the natives, and
there seemed to be little possibility of profitable trade.

The Spaniards, the Portuguese and
the Dutch saw little in the new land to recommend it. They were to have no more
to do with the development of the idea of what it meant to be Australian. The
picture they drew stimulated no further interest, and the names that they had
given it - Terra Australis, Austrialia did Espiritu Santo, Zuidland, New
Holland, Van Diemen's Land - fell into disuse. Instead it was the English image
of the new continent which was to prove most powerful and most lasting, and
which was to attract more interest, promote its exploitation, and bring settlers
to it. This was not due to any greater perseverance by the English, nor even to
the fact that they came to the more fertile eastern coast of Australia. It was
due, rather, to a revolution taking place in European attitudes to, and
curiosity about, man, nature and science.

Dampier dismayed

That revolution can be seen clearly
if we compare the images of the continent popularised by two Englishmen, by
Dampier at the end of the seventeenth century, and by Cook towards the end of
the eighteenth. William Dampier made two voyages to what was then called New
Holland, in 1688 and 1699. On each occasion his descriptions of the land, its
flora, fauna and inhabitants, were more detailed but just as unfavourable as
those of the Dutch. Like them he was full of complaints. The land was barren and
fly-pestered; the water was brackish if any could be found; the trees were
stunted and bore no fruit; and the animals that might provide food were not
plentiful.

He saved his most vivid language for
the Aborigines. 'The poor winking People of New Holland', whose
appearance and habits he set down in disgusted but picturesque detail:

The Inhabitants
of this country are the miserablest People in the world. The Hodmados
of Monopatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are
Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and Skin Garments, Sheep,
Poultry, and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs, & c. as the Hodmadods
have: and setting aside their humane shape they differ but little
from Brutes. They are tall, strait bodied, and thin, with small long
limbs. They have great Heads, round Foreheads, and great Brows. Their
Eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their Eyes...
They are long visaged, and of a very unpleasing aspect; having no one
graceful feature in their faces. Their Hair is black, short and curl'd,
like that of the Negroes; and not long and lank like the common Indians.
The colour of their skins, both of their faces and the rest of their
body, is coal black, like that of the Negroes of Guinea.

They have no sort
of Cloaths; but a piece of the rind of a Tree ty'd like a Giordle about
their wastes, and a handful of long Grass, or 3 or 4 small green Boughs,
full of Leaves, thrust under their Girdle, to cover their nakedness.

They have no
Houses, but lye in the open Air, without any covering; the Earth being
their Bed, and the Heaven their Canopy. Whether they cohabit one Man to
one Woman, or promiscuously, I know not: but they do live in companies,
20 or 30 Men, women, and Children together. Their only food is a small
sort of Fish, which they get by making Wares of stone, across little
Coves, or branches of the Sea... sometimes they get as many Fish as
makes them a plentiful Banquet; and at other times they scarce get every
one a taste, but be it little or much that they get, every one has his
part, as well the young and tender, as the old and feeble, who are not
able to go abroad as the strong and busy...

I did not perceive
that they did worship any thing. These poor creatures have a sort of
Weapon to defend their Ware, or fight with their Enemies, if they have
any that will interfere with their poor Fishery... I saw no Iron nor any
other sort of Metal; therefore it is probable they use Stone-Hatchets,
as some Indians in America do.

Clearly Dampier was not impressed.
This passage, the first extended description of the Aborigines of Australia, was
to set the pattern of European responses to the Aborigines for many years to
come. His second voyage to New Holland confirmed his original opinion of the
place, and again his description of the inhabitants was uncomplimentary: they
had a 'natural Deformity' and 'the most unpleasant Looks and the worst Features
of any People that ever I saw, tho' I have seen great variety of Savages.'

However such criticism says as much
about the writer as it does about the Aborigines. Dampier was disappointed at
finding no gold or spices or anything else worth trading. That, after all, was
his purpose in making contact with the inhabitants:

I intended
especially to observe what Inhabitants I should meet with, and to try to
win them over to somewhat of Traffic and useful Intercourse, as there
might be commodities among any of them that might be fit for Trade or
Manufacture, or any found out in which they might be employed. though as
to the New Hollanders hereabouts, by the Experience I had had of
their Neighbours formerly, I expected no great matters from them.

There were no commodities fit for
trade or manufacture, so it is not surprising that Dampier should stress the
country's general barrenness, and the poverty and nakedness of its people. Even
the possibility that the people might prove useful as labourers came to nothing.
When Dampier performed lengthy charades to explain to the Aborigines that they
should work for him, carrying barrels of water to the ship, they simply 'grinn'd
like so many Monkeys'. So the land and its people were dismissed: he was
motivated by a desire for profit, and there was no profit to be had there.

Dampier's comments were also the
product of a particular view of the relationship between civilised man and
nature. He was a contemporary of Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe was
published in 1719, by which time Dampier's account of his first voyage was in
the fifth edition. both men's works reflected similar views of the world. The
difference between European man and the save was civilisation, or as Dampier put
it. 'Wealth'. This was measured in material terms: clothes, weapons, permanent
housing and creature comforts were the signs of civilised man, who was
distinguished from barbaric souls by his industry, his respect for material
possessions and his reading of the Bible. Proof of the barbarity of the
Aborigines lay in the fact that 'these poor creatures seem not accustomed to
carry burthens', that they failed 'to admire anything that we had', and appeared
to lack religion.

This outlook was to be challenged in
the next hundred years. Even in Dampier's writing there were hints of a
scientific interest that was much more marked in cook's journals. When Tasman's
hopes for trade were disappointed, he shoed no further interest in his Van
Diemen's Land, except for the wishful comment that in such an expanse there must
be something of value somewhere. Dampier expressed his disappointment too, but
the very length of the accounts of what he found reflected an interest that went
beyond mere trade, and an awareness that there was a popular curiosity in new
discovery. Dampier's journal was a success among the small but growing public
that was supporting the beginnings of a scientific revolution in England.
Already the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, was
40 years old, and was providing a focus for that revolution - Isaac Newton was
about to become its president. the society was largely made up of enthusiastic
amateurs, but they were concerned to promote a professional approach to the
collection of new knowledge:

To study
Nature rather than books, and from the Observations, made of the
Phenomena and Effects she presents, to compose such a History of
Her, as may hereafter serve to build a solid and Useful Philosophy upon.

Thus they were interested in voyages
of discovery for the sake of science, not for the sake of profit. They had
formulated a set of 'Directions for Seamen, bound for far voyages' which were to
be issued to men like Dampier so that science as well as commerce might profit
from their discoveries. So when Dampier published his account of the first
voyage, it was not surprising that he dedicated it to Charles Mountague,
President of the royal Society, with the modest assessment of his discoveries:

As the scene of
them is not only Remote, but for the most part little frequented also,
so there may be some things in them New even to you; and some, possibly,
not altogether unuseful to the publick.

A Mine of Scientific
Novelty

By the time of Cook's voyages round
the world, this interest in science had become dominant. One naturalist, in
introducing the public to the botany of New Holland, admitted that it so far
offered little that was useful Instead he put the case of Science for Science's
sake:

It is the
peculiar privilege of reasoning man, not only to extend his enquiries to
a multiplicity of attainable benefits to himself and his species... but
also to walk with God through the garden of creation, and be initiated
into the different plans of his providence in the construction and
economy of all these various beings... In this point of view no natural
production is beneath the notice of the philosopher, nor any enquiry
trifling under the guidance of a scientific mind.

There was much more to voyaging then
mere trade. The whole purpose of Cook's first voyage was a scientific one - to
visit Tahiti in order to observe the transit of Venus across the sun in the hope
that, from measurements made there, the distance between the sun and the earth
could be calculated. It was undertaken at the direct request of the royal
society for this the president of the royal society provided advice on how to
collect specimens, record vocabularies and accurately observe the inhabitants,
plants and animals. A second, more secret purpose was to try to settle the
question of wh3ether there was a continent in the south seas. Cook set out with
a large scientific party on board, in itself something quite novel. There were
two astronomers, two naturalists (Joseph Banks, later to be president of the
royal Society for a record term, and Dr. Daniel Solander of the newly
established British Museum), John Ellis, an English naturalist, wrote excitedly
to Linnaeus, the most renowned naturalist of the day:

No people ever
went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, not
more elegantly. They have got a fine library of Natural History; they
have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all
kinds of nets, trawls, drags, and hooks ... many cases of bottles with
ground stoppers, of several sizes, to preserve animals in spirits.
they have several sorts of salts... in short, Solander assured me this
expedition would cost Mr. Banks ten thousand pounds. All this owning to
you and your writings.

They retuned three years lager,
'laden with spoils': 1000 new species of plants, 500 fish, 500 skins of animals
and birds, innumerable insects, rocks and native artifacts and the vocabularies
of unheard-of languages.

The scientific purpose of the voyage
also meant that they returned with a new image of Australia. cook had not been
able to find a southern continent, but had sailed along the eastern coast of
that continent whose western side Dampier had so disparaged. As far as commerce
went, Cook agreed with Dampier; although the east was not as barren and
miserable as the west, and the hand of Industry could produce grain, fruits and
cattle in the future, 'the Country itself so far as we know doth not produce any
one thing that can become an Article in trade to invite Europeans to fix a
settlement upon it'. So commercial interests continued to ignore Australia; for
them it was as barren as it always had been.

For scientists, however, there were
vast riches. The specimens which the naturalists took back from new continent
firmly established it in the minds of scientists as a land of oddities. to be
native to New Holland was to be, almost by definition, freakish and bizarre.
cook had acknowledged the importance of the botanical discoveries when he named
their fist landfall on the continent 'The great quantity of New Plants &ca. Mr
Banks & Dr Solander collected in this place occasioned my giving it the name of
Botany Bay.' Linnaeus called the plants that Banks and Solander took back 'a
matchless and truly astonishing collection, such as has never been seen before,
nor may ever be seen again'. The most remarkable thing about them was that they
simply did not fit into the accepted botanical classifications of the day, which
were those devised by Linnaeus. As Sir James Edward Smith, the first president
of the Linnean Society, explained, anyone working on the botany of New Holland
found 'himself as it were in a new world... Whole tribes of plants ... prove...
total strangers ... not only all the species that present themselves are new,
but most of the genera, and even natural orders'.

Yet even more extraordinary were the
animals, the marvellous oddities of a topsy-turvy land. There was a fish which
Banks found 'a very singular Phaenomenon', which not only jumped from rock to
rock, but did not particularly seem to prefer water to land.' the activities of
Australian ants were 'most curious' and most extraordinary (sic)' and 'probably
in no country more admirable than in this'. One of the seamen came across a
flying fox, which he described to Banks as being 'about as large and much like a
one gallon cagg, as black as the Devil and had 2 horns on its head, it was but
Slowly but I dared not touch it'. He would not have been the only member of the
crew whose main concerns were drink and damnation. But strangest of all was the
kangaroo which they finally tracked down and killed. It was a complete novelty.
as Banks wrote, 'To compare it to any European animal would be impossible as it
has not the least resemblance of any one I have seen'. Even the hard-to-please
Dr Johnson was prepared to admit an interest in the kangaroo, and soon 'this
unparalleled Animal from the Southern Hemisphere, that almost surpasses Belief'
was being exhibited in the Strand, admittance one shilling.

The reason for the plants, animals
and people of New Holland attracting so much scientific interest lay in the way
they fitted into the eighteenth-century view of the universe. It was a common
belief that every species of plant and animal had its own unique slot in a great
chain of being that stretched from the highest form of life to the lowest, a
chain which had been fixed at creation and would continue for all time.
Naturalists believed that there were still gaps in the chain, and they looked to
new botanical and zoological discoveries to fill them. the Pacific seemed to be
providing two crucial links in the chain, the link between the plant kingdom and
the animal kingdom, and the link between the highest animal and man himself. The
plant-animal link was thought to be the zoophytes, the minute creators of the
fantastic corals taken back by Banks, Solander and others. The link between the
monkey and man was thought by many to be the Australian Aborigine, for no better
reason than that he seemed to be furthest from European civilisation, which in
their arrogance they assumed to be the highest imaginable form of human life.

Thus when Banks described the
Aborigines as being 'but one degree removed from Brutes', he was mentally
placing them on the chain just one step above the animal kingdom. similarly
George Shaw, the zoologist, thought them 'less elevated above the inferior
animals than in any other part of the known world'. Later visitors to New South
Wales reinforced that view. Even in the 1840s it was still a common image of the
Aborigine among the white invaders. They were 'the last link in the great chain
of existence which unites man with the monkey' to Augustus Earle, the artist,
and Peter Cunningham asked if they should be placed 'at the very zero of
civilisation, constituting in a measure the connecting link between man and the
monkey tribe? - for really some of the old women only seem to require a tail to
complete the identity'. It was an image that conveniently suited those who were
gradually destroying Aboriginal society in the name of 'civilization' and the
expansion of their sheep-runs.

At the same time though, Australia
was supplying evidence which increasingly challenged the concept of the chain of
being. robert Brown, a naturalist with Matthew Flinders, had collected 1400
specimens in Australia, 2000 of which were new to science. When he published his
findings in 1810, he abandoned the Linnean system of classification, arguing in
nature the natural orders were linked 'more after the manner of a network than
of a chain'. Francois Peron, a French naturalist, also found that New Holland
mocks our studies and shakes to their foundations the most firmly established
and mot universally admitted of our scientific opinions'. Here the order was
confused. Here there were plants and animals that just did not fit into a place
on the chain. Nature seemed to mix up the chain completely by, for example,
attaching a duck's bill to a mole's body and calling it a platypus. for the
logic of the chain to work, ducks should have nothing at all to do with moles,
so when George Shaw saw his first platypus, he assumed it was a skilful hoax and
tried to find the place where two different animals had been sewn together.
Though such unnatural productions as the platypus, Australia, the land of
oddities, contributed to the demise of the chain of being. Among scientists, it
was to be replaced, later in the nineteenth century, by the theory of organic
evolution, finally outline4d in Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859.
It is significant that the three scientists who contributed most to that theory
- Darwin, J.D. Hooker and T. H. Huxley - had all visited Australia. The land of
oddities had become an essential port of call for anyone working on the
frontiers of science.

The idea that Australia was a land
of oddities also had a more popular vogue. In 1817, the Reverend Sydney Smith
thought it a joke:

in
this remote part of the earth, Nature (having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese,
oaks, elms, and all regular productions for the rest of the world) seems
determined to have a bit of play, and to amuse herself as she pleases.

Much play was made of the idea that
in Australia there was an inversion of natural laws, an old idea but one that
was popularised by Australia's zoological oddities. So Australia was the land
which was upside-down, topsy-turvy, where it was day when it should have been
night, summer when it should have been winter, where, it was said, grass grew on
trees and rivers flowed uphill. It was an idea that continued to have a certain
popular appeal for long afterwards.

Noble Savages

The image of the Aborigines also
contributed to ideas of what it was on the Australian. Those who saw the country
as barren tended to view the Aborigines with disgust. Those motivated by an
interest in science saw the Aborigines as yet another oddity worthy of
observation; indeed, among scientists, throughout the nineteenth century, the
word 'Australian' referred to the Aboriginal rather than the white population.
both Banks and Cook viewed the Aborigines with a scientific curiosity and
occasionally with the disgust of Dampier but at other times there was something
that almost bordered on envy. It was as if, since Dampier's day, people had
grown bored with the civilised life of Europe. Intellectuals had begun to
idealise man in what they regarded as his 'natural' state, in which he knew
nothing of the burdensome demands of civilisation. Damper had pitied the
Aborigines because they did not know how to work - now men were asking might not
a life without work, where all the necessities of life were provided by nature,
be a very pleasant one? Dampier had been surprised that they had so few
possessions, and pitied them when they did not admire European clothes and
ornaments. Now Banks and Cook found they tore off and abandoned the clothes they
had been given. to Banks this was proof that they could be quite happy without
the clutter of European civilisation. 'Thus live these I had almost said happy
people, content with little nay almost nothing'. He wondered how small are the
real wants of human nature, which we Europeans have increased to an excess.'

As Cook left the Australian coast,
turning back from the unknown to civilisation, he too began to idealise the life
of the Aborigine:

...they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth,
but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly
unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary
Conveniencies so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not
knowing the use of them.

These were a people who appeared
totally uncivilised, without agriculture, without permanent homes, totally
naked: according to Cook, 'even those parts which I always before now thought
nature would have taught a woman to conceal were uncover'd'. Yet it seemed they
had all they desired. This in itself made them interesting as scientific
curiosities. However, the information that Cook and his party brought back did
not only interest scientists. In the official account of Cook's first voyage,
written by John Hawkesworth and published two years after Cook's return,
Hawkesworth apologizes for the amount of detail that has been included for
scientists, and comments:

It is however hoped, that those who
read merely for entertainment will be compensated by the description of
countries which no European had before visited, and manners which is many
instances exhibit a new picture of human life.

He knew that the new discoveries
would interest not only those primarily concerned with science, but also a class
of general reader who, as Hawkesworth suggested, would wonder about the nature
of human life, just as Cook had. Among such readers, Cook's voyages stimulated
and reinforced a cult of the 'noble savage', a cult that was less scientific
than philosophical. When Hawkesworth wrote his account, based on the journals of
Cook and Hanks, he blithely ditched scientific accuracy and used their comments
about the Aborigines of New South Wales to describe the inhabitants of Tierra
del Fuego. He was not writing for scientists but for a readership attracted by
novelty or interested in a philosophical debate about civilisation. By the end
of the eighteenth century there were several lines of thought concerning
primitive man. first, there was an idealised picture of the noble savage and the
simple life, which in Europe had been destroyed by civilisation. According to
this view, natural man was far better off without the knowledge of civilisation.
supporters of this ideal were later able to point to the ravages inflicted on
the original inhabitants of Australia and the Pacific by the introduction of
European disease, weapons and technology.

Cook's voyages stimulated this
tradition, although it was the reports of Tahiti which captured the European
imagination rather than the harder lives of the Australian Aborigine or the
Patagonian. Tahiti, where cook's men cavorted with graceful 'dusky maidens',
seemed like a Garden of Eden before the fall; shame and hardship were unknown;
all the necessities of life were provided by a bounteous nature, with minimum
exertion on the part of man. Hawkesworth's account of the first voyage, and the
etchings that went with it, turned the people and places that Cook came across
into noble savages and classical Arcadian landscapes for popular consumption.
then on his second voyage, Cook returned with a noble savage in the flesh. Omai,
who did the rounds of London society, generally to the admiration of all who met
him. A meeting with him at her father's house caused the young Fanny Burney to
contemplate man and nature, and is typical of the way in which cook's
discoveries were received by the noble savage school. In her diary she compared
Omai, who had 'no tutor but Nature', favourably with an acquaintance, who had
received a rigorously systematic education from his father, and had had all the
advantages civilisation could provide, yet had turned out remarkably awkward.
She concluded: 'I think this shows how much more nature can do without art, that
art with all her refinement unassisted by nature'.

It was only to be expected that with
the various population of the Pacific confused in the popular mind, the
Australians were sometimes seen in the same light. At other times they were seen
as 'hard' primitives as opposed to the 'soft' primitives of Tahiti, but they
remained just as noble, and to some - Cook, for example, preferable. so in the
etchings produc3ed for the publication of the journals of Phillip and Hunter,
the Aborigines were given classical physiques, classical posture and classical
poses, even if the original sketches were for less flattering. The image of the
Australian was being forced into a classical mould for the men of taste who were
expected to buy these expensive volumes. this admiration filtered through
to other perceptions. George Barrington, a convict whose aesthetic sense perhaps
explains his propensity for picking pockets, left an admiring description of his
Aboriginal companion in 1796:

a form that
might serve as a perfect model for the most scrupulous statuary; her
face ... of a perfect oval, or Grecian shape, with features regularly
beautiful, and as fine a pair of eyes as can be imagined ... she was
likewise of a much lighter colour than any of her countrywomen.

Similarly, Charles Pickering, who
visited Australia with the United States Exploring Expedition between 1838 and
1842, thought that, while some individual Aborigines were of surpassing
ugliness', others

had
the face decidedly fine; and several of the young women had a very pleasing
expression of countenance ... Strange as it may appear, I would refer to an
Australian, as the finest model of the human proportions. I have never met with;
in muscular development, combining perfect symmetry, activity, and strength;
while his head might have been compared with an antique bust of a philosopher.

Pickering was aware when he wrote
that his view of the Aborigine was no longer a generally accepted one. Even when
Cook returned from his first voyage, the noble savage was being satirised in
London. Dr Johnson was quite confident that civilisation was to be preferred
philosophically, and in any case was rather more comfortable than the state of
nature. He once dismissed the Aborigines as uninteresting on discovering they
had no tails. Other satirists continued to attack the idea. Banks became a butt
of their verse, especially when it was known that he had found, as he put it, a
'snug lodging' with some of the Tahitian women, and had taken advantage of the
'opportunity of putting their politeness to every test'. This satirical view of
the noble savage led easily into a comic view of Aborigines, which was to be
particularly popular in the colony itself. They were dressed in the comic
cast-offs, of Europeans, loaded with alcohol, taught a few words of English, and
set up as grotesque figures of fun. The casual jokes about the land of oddities
had a darker side which was cruel and vicious.

A more powerful force than either
the satirists or the admirers of the noble savage in shaping ideas about the
Aborigines was the evangelical movement which was rapidly gaining influence at
the end of the eighteenth century. The evangelicals condemned the idea of the
noble savage because it implied that there were men who had escaped the fall. In
their interpretation of the Bible, natural man was brutish and unregenerate,
lacking shame and moral sense. They had evidence from Cook and other observers
of nakedness, promiscuity, cannibalism, and infanticide. When Captain Watkin
Tench reflected on the Australian Aborigines in 1793, for example, he wished
that those philosophers who 'exalt a state of nature above a state of
civilization' could learn that natural man was neither happy nor rational:

a savage
roaming for prey amidst his native deserts, is a creature deformed by
all those passions, which afflict and degrade our nature, unsoftened by
the influence of religion, philosophy and legal restriction.

For such men, natural man was
naturally evil. for some, that justified 'civilised' man's harsh treatment and
dispossession of the Aborigines. It was a view which allowed British law to
ignore the Aborigines' right to their own lands and was a popular belief when
the Aborigines' lands became more valuable in the 1830s. For others, natural man
needed to be civilised by Protestantism for the sake of his salvation. The
accounts of the Pacific explorers jolted such men into action . the Missionary
Society was founded in London in 1795, and soon missionaries were being sent to
save the4 Tahitians from immorality and the Australians from ignorance. for the
evangelicals, New Holland was a land sunk in depravity, a land awaiting
salvation, and they set and with a good supply of trousers.

Even before European settlement in
Australia, then, there were, among those who cared to think about it,
well-established images of what is meant to be Australian. These images were the
reflection not of a reality, but of the interests and assumptions of particular
groups. for commercial interests, Cook had offered no advance on Dampier's
damning picture of a continent which had nothing to trade. At most it could
provide a base for whaling, and perhaps for the china trade, and the possibility
that in the future something might turn up. For scientists on the other hand,
the continent held out great botanical and zoological riches, including key
links in both the great chain of being and the theory of evolution which
overthrew it. but it was also a strange land, full of natural oddities that did
not fit into the accepted order of things, a topsy-turvy world where nature
seemed at odds with herself. For some it was a land untouched by civilisation, a
primitive land in a perfect state of nature. Its inhabitants could provoke
fashionable envy for their supposed pristine happiness, cynical amusement at
their comical antics, or pious disgust at their depravity and barbaric
ignorance.

These various images ebbed and
flowed through the minds of those few Europeans who ever thought about the
continent before British settlement. Something of each of them was to remain
part of the image of Australia in Europe, long after the British invasion and
even into the twentieth century. As these images jostled with each other the
Aborigines lost out. The weird animals and plants became popular symbols of
Australian identity. They were to appear on coats of arms and coins, and as
company trade marks. They were elevated into the conventional, neutral symbols
of Australia.

The Aborigines fared worse. In
Europe they remained representative of Australia, placed beside the plants and
animals as natural objects of curiosity. In Australia, as the idea of 'being
Australian' developed among the European inhabitants, the Aborigines became less
and less representative of 'Australia' until in the end they were quite
dispossessed. For most of the settlers they were pests, sometimes comic,
sometimes vicious, but always standing in the way of a civilised Australian
community. Eventually they were to reach the indignity of being 'Our
Aborigines', their image no longer representative of Australia except as garden
ornaments in suburban backyards and ashtrays in souvenir shops.

Thank you so much for visiting the above five Domains. I am
very pleased to be able to share with you that further limited
advertising on our Australia Origin Home Page, along with other Web
Pages within the above Domains, are now available. Potential
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